Zohra Drif

Zohra Drif (1934-) was the Vice-President of the Council of the Nation (the upper house of the Algerian parliament) and a lawyer who was famous for her role in the Algerian War as an FLN militant, as well as for her marriage to president Rabah Bitat.

Biography
Zohra Drif was born in 1934 in Tissemsilt, French North Africa to a Sunni Muslim Berber family, and she studied at the University of Algiers Faculty of Law during the 1950s. In 1956, she joined the FLN during the Algerian independence struggle against France, and on 30 September 1956 she was sent to bomb the milk bar on the Rue d'Isly, a venue frequented by French youths. She wore her hair in the Parisian fashion and entered the bar, leaving her bag next to a stool before leaving. Three were killed and dozens injured in the bombing, one of the first actions of the Battle of Algiers. In October 1957, Drif and her boyfriend Saadi Yacef were arrested by the French Army, and she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor in prison. She was pardoned by Charles de Gaulle in 1962 after Algerian independence, and she became a lawyer and the wife of FLN leader and future president Rabah Bitat. She would later assume the title of Vice-President of the Council of the Nation, the upper house of the Algerian parliament, and she practiced law.